Thursday, April 28, 2011

Me: "Hello? Is this ABC Lace Store? Is the owner Mr. XYZ there?"XYZ: "This is Mr. XYZ."Me: "Oh, hi there! Did the 3" satin lace I ordered in as yet? You said that it would be in within 2 days....if you remember?"XYZ: "Oh yes, Madam, I remember. But I have not been coming to my shop for the last 20 days because I have been sick."Me: (mentally) But I just saw you 4 days earlier and were perfectly hale and hearty!

Its been 4 months now and the lace never came in. I had to import the satin lace, a simple simple item, from USA.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

I am so excited to tell you all that my Custom tags from Shari of luvs2create2 on Etsy came in over this weekend. I opened the parcel today early morning as the sun was coming up and it felt like Christmas morning with the gorgeous gift wrapping.

Shari customized all my tags to match the Navy blue velvet boxes that I use for my Bridal orders. Just look at all those tags!! Aren’t they lovely?

Saturday, April 9, 2011

During my B-school days, I came across "Customer-mapping" / "taste mapping" again and again. In a sentence it is a tool to analyze the customers, where they come from, what their buying preferences are. The idea is to "predict" the future buying trends and in a way predict the market.

Remember the "what you dos" and "who you ares" on credit card forms or magazine forms? Well, they are used to "chart" or "map" customers. And also draw correlation between seemingly unrelated activities. For example "bar fights are mostly started by men wearing cuff links." Or "Women over 40 buying Red Chanel lipstick mostly carry a Blackberry". (These two are just sentences I conjured up, NOT industry based data....but you get the picture). Although these may seem as unrelated activities, you will be surprised to hear how important data like these is to big companies.

Why I am talking of all this with regards to Etsy? Because Caterina Fake joined Etsy in Aug 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_FakeAnd she launched "Hunch" "a site that is building the "taste graph" of the internet, mapping every user on the internet to every entity, and their affinity for that entity" in June 2009.When all the hullabooloo with Etsy becoming a "social" network etc started, I just knew that Etsy will become another "hunch" like site. Don't ask me....how I just had a a"hunch"...heeehaw.

Etsy says that "We need a homepage designed specifically for new visitors, with a new design that is clearly aimed at keeping them on the site." The new site will throw items at them that is based on the taste test.

As individual sellers, I am not sure how much it will help us. For example, I want ALL new visitors to be bead buyers and T shirt seller wants T-shirt buyers and a soap seller wants soap buyers. But the new home page may or may not throw out beads or T-shirts or soaps right?? To be honest I am not sure if supplies will be suggested AT ALL!! I have noticed that Etsy NEVER features a Supplies seller, or supplies in the finds or any Storque article. In spite of the fact that supplies are by far the biggest earners for Etsy.

So it is my honest opinion that the new page benefits Etsy as a whole, and is not beneficial to us individual sellers.